Warehouse cages are bulky but light per piece, and the shipping method directly drives freight cost and delivery time. Full-truck load (FTL), less-than-truckload (LTL) and shared load suit very different scenarios. Choose wrong and you may overpay freight — or, worse, cages bashed out of shape at a transshipment hub.
Full-truck shipping: prefer it when shipping 30+ cages at once or filling a whole truck (a 6.8 m truck holds about 40–60 folded cages). It runs direct to destination with no transshipment, so damage rate is lowest and per-unit freight is best value; FTL within 800 km usually arrives in 2–3 days.
LTL shipping: when you have a few to a dozen cages and can't fill a truck, use a dedicated-line LTL service, billed per piece or per volume, in 4–7 days. The downside is multiple load/unload cycles at logistics terminals, raising deformation risk — so wrap extra film around the cages, add corner protectors, and mark them 'Fragile – Do Not Drop'.
Shared-load shipping: several shippers in the same direction share one truck; the price sits between FTL and LTL, and delivery is 1–2 days slower than FTL. It suits medium batches of 15–30 cages; the maker or the logistics provider organizes consolidation, and the customer only confirms the delivery address and arrival time.
Recommendation: prefer FTL above 20 cages, LTL under 5 with proper reinforcement, and ask the maker about shared load in between. Before dispatch, Nanjing Tongnuo Warehouse Equipment Manufacturing Co., Ltd. quotes all three methods by quantity and destination for the customer to choose.